stuff by nick o'leary

I made a thing. I wanted to make lots of things last year, but didn’t. That made me sad. It being a new year and all, it felt like a good time to start making.

Last summer, I was fortunate enough to be invited to BERG’s Little Printer Hack Day. I went along with not only all sorts of ideas to play with but also a migraine and ongoing waves of nausea through-out the day. Which wasn’t ideal. Despite that, it was a fun day and having managed to not pass out, I worked with Kass to make the ASCII Meterogram – a weather report from the Norwegian Meterological Institute and NRK.

A couple weeks ago, whilst contemplating doing a write-up of the year I stumbled over the code from the hack day and decided I ought to do something with it. Later the same day, for reasons I don’t recall, I found myself falling down the rabbit-hole of Maze generation algorithms on Wikipedia.

Not long later, I had a Little Printer publication that serves up a new random maze every day. There isn’t much to it really – just your standard recursive backtracker algorithm in a few lines of javascript. As you do.

The code’s up on GitHub. It’s a Django app, so if that’s your thing, feel free to have a play. Otherwise, have a look at the sample, or subscribe your own Little Printer through the BERG Cloud remote.

It feels good to make a thing. To make a thing, ship it and see, as of the moment I’m writing this, 30 people subscribed to receive a daily piece of the thing.